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IS the destination more important, or is it the journey? In the movies, as in life, everything hinges on where a character is headed and how he/she gets there. So travel movies — films that have a physical journey at their narrative heart — have a life and logic of their own. A comic road movie or a light romantic yarn, for instance, would have its own pace and rhythm, while an intense drama about characters on the move is likely to follow quite another trajectory. It is, therefore, pretty easy to explain why a breezy comic romp like Mr Bean’s Holiday, which draws sustenance from Rowan Atkinson’s risible gawkiness, differs completely in tone and tenor from Wes Anderson’s quirky The Darjeeling Limited. The two films were made and released in the same year — 2007 — but went their own unique ways. Similarly, Mahesh Bhatt’s Dil Hai Ke Manta Nahin (1991), a reworking of Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934), about a runaway heiress who falls for a newspaper reporter on the trail of a scoop, is a world apart from John Hughes’ Planes, Trains, Automobiles (1987), in which Steve Martin’s hot and bothered marketing executive is in a desperate scramble to get back home for Thanksgiving but is thwarted by the elements.
Indeed, every movie represents a journey. The very making of a film is a voyage — it brings often-disparate individuals together in pursuit of a common goal. Moreover, the characters that people a film’s storyline also undertake a trip, sometimes external, at others internal, through physical or emotional spaces that have a life-altering impact on them. Remember Satyajit Ray’s Kanchenjunga (1962) and Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in a Forest, 1969), both of which revolve around a group of people (a family in the former, a bunch of urban buddies in the latter) who travel away from familiar environs only to be transformed by the new experiences and encounters the journey exposes them to. In The Darjeeling Limited, director Anderson crafts a darkly comic universe in which three estranged American brothers journey through India in search of themselves and their mother. The stunning vistas and the people they encounter during the trip open their eyes to possibilities of self-discovery, of salvation. However, in the slapstick world of Mr Bean’s Holiday, the hero is beyond deliverance — he wins a free trip to Cannes in the south of France and, on the way there, goofs up big time at every step. He lands in trouble, faces ridicule, and makes a right royal nuisance of himself but, in true comic vein, remains steadfastly unalterable. But that isn’t what one could say about the six honeymooning couples in debutante director Reema Kagti’s delightful Honeymoon Travels Pvt Ltd (2007). The journey changes each one of them forever. As a film, Honeymoon Travels occupies a space between the all-out funny and the outright sombre and it does so with an ease that raises the film well above the level of a regular travel film. Kagti’s story has depth and range all the way through. Around the World in Eighty Days (1956), Michael Anderson’s adaptation of Jules Verne’s famous novel with David Niven playing the role of Victorian nobleman Phileas Fogg, was a film about a journey in every sense of the term. But it was just as much about a man getting in touch with his own inner self. Fogg is a gentleman who lacks the ability to make a connection with the world around him, but as he travels afar, he loses both his fortune and his inhibitions and finds a treasure that he never had — true emotions. Travel films assume an array of forms and each director possesses a storytelling style that separates his film from those of others. In Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), actor-director Woody Allen uses a remarkable cast — Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz, Scarlett Johansson and Rebecca Hall — to carve out a riveting, witty tale of human relationships framed against the beauty and variety of Barcelona, one of the most striking cities in all of Europe. Even more unusual is Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Kandahar (2001). The film, based on a true story and filmed in docu-drama style, is about a Canada-based Afghani woman who receives a letter from her sister, who threatens to commit suicide because she cannot bear to live any longer in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. The former heads off to Iran in the hope of crossing the border to get to Afghanistan. But the nearer she gets to her destination, the further it seems to be from her. For her, the journey isn’t a Roman Holiday (1953), in which the utterly bewitching Audrey Hepburn, playing a Princess, falls in love with a reporter (Gregory Peck), while on a trip to Rome. The classic 1953 William Wyler film brings Rome alive like very few films ever have. Roman Holiday was a double delight — it gave us Rome in all its splendour and Hepburn in her timeless glory. A trip to remember.
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